In response to a broad cellular outage, AT&T announced on February 24 that customers who were affected or may have been affected will get billing credits. On February 22, AT&T spent almost 10 hours dealing with service outages of their 5G network, which involves over 290 million people in the US.
An improper procedure applied and executed during the network’s expansion triggered the outage that impacted many customers. According to AT&T, it was not a cyberhack.
Reports show that customers first noticed service interruptions on Thursday, February 22. Over 70,000 AT&T customers reported disruptions between eight and nine am Eastern Standard Time. The corporation has not formally confirmed the number of impacted clients.
Posts on the X social networking platform by government agencies in many U.S. cities indicate that the outage affected the ability to reach emergency services by calling 911.
On Thursday, the FCC said it was investigating the issue, and AT&T and the DHS were collaborating to determine the root cause.
On average, a full day’s worth of service will be credited to affected customers, AT&T announced on Saturday. The business acknowledged that the outage had disappointed many consumers, apologized for the inconvenience it caused, and is working on a solution to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Other carriers, such as T-Mobile and UScellular, also had interruptions during the AT&T issue, although they weren’t as severe. Although some consumers had problems connecting to AT&T users, T-Mobile and UScellular saw few outages, and their networks continued to operate regularly.
More than twenty thousand 911 emergency calls were unsuccessful because of a twelve-hour T-Mobile outage in June 2020. Authorities resolved the case for nineteen and a half million dollars in fines in 2021.
The FCC estimated that 41% of all calls that tried to utilize T-Mobile’s network throughout the outage failed and that more than 250 million calls from customers of other service providers to T-Mobile customers failed as a result of the outage.
